Posted by Amy Dugdale on Mon, Jan 19, 2009 @ 01:00 PM
For the first time, there is more to the president's departure than the traditional, last-minute pardons - the transfer of emails to the National Archives.
As the Washington Post reports in a January 15th article:
A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files.
I'll admit that I've already been sipping the Inaugural Punch. But even in my semi-euphoric state, an estimated price tag of $10 million to locate 14 million emails hurts. Ouch.
In addition, the article goes on to talk about how:
U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered employees of the president's executive office -- with just days to go before their departure -- to undertake a comprehensive search of computer workstations, preserve portable hard drives and examine any e-mail archives created or retained from 2003 to 2005, the period in which e-mails appeared to be missing.
This order is in addition to the private contractors hired to search through "an estimated 60,000 tapes that contain daily recordings of the entire contents of the White House computers as a precaution against an electronic disaster."
Nick has already done a great job of talking about how implementing a central email archive with search functionality can make life with corporate email much easier. So, I won't get into that this time.
What I do want to say is that the technology available for preserving and searching emails is significantly better than many of these articles are making it sound. I've got to advocate for the fact that many of today's email archiving solutions are up to snuff for jobs like this, even in the White House. It's the human error factor that can't be accounted for, which is why it makes even more sense to outsource to a third party with specific expertise in email archiving.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 @ 06:34 PM
In a time where good news is hard to find, we were blessed to see our business grow dramatically in the fourth quarter of 2008. As we announced, we had our best quarter by far in our company's history while growing sales 148% year-over-year versus Q4 of 2007.
How is this possible in a down economy? We're still trying to pinch ourselves to see if we're dreaming. And we know that 2009 could still be challenging. However, a few points are becoming clear:
- Email archiving continues to grow in market demand despite the downturn, and in some cases because of it. The SEC reported that firms cannot cut email compliance projects, despite the economy. And the recession is creating a new waive of litigation and e-discovery.
- SaaS (software-as-a-service) is really taking off. As InternetNews points out:
"Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one of the technologies the company picked. Many businesses are turning to the category of product to cut costs, avoid the expenses of installing and maintaining on-site software..."
- Put two and two together and hosted email archivingis red hot. Customers want the benefits of archiving, but don't want to add yet another task to their IT staff while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, servers and storage. As Brian Babineau from Enterprise Strategy Group says:
"Today the decision isn't whether or not to archive email, but instead how best to implement a solution. In light of the current economy, an increasing number of companies are turning to SaaS solutions to help them reduce upfront capital expenditures on in-house hardware and software deployments, while also lessening the system management burden placed on overworked IT resources."
Posted by Nick Mehta on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 @ 05:38 PM
If I had a dollar for every IT customer that says they are "waiting for legal to define their retention policies" before they implement their email archive, I'd be a rich man.
David Ferris on his Ferris Research blog has a great post on customers' decisions email retention schedules.
His key takeaways:
* For a small proportion of emails, retention schedules are applied. This is usually because the user has dragged the document into a folder with an associated retention policy.
* Defining retention policy is usually left to users. It's too labor-intensive to do this, so it's usually not done. When users do define a retention policy, they often do so incorrectly.
* A diminishing proportion of organizations delete information after some period, perhaps 30 or 60 days.
* An increasing proportion of organizations today make no systematic attempts to delete emails at all.
It's pretty interesting how customer thinking around retention has evolved during my 5-year career in email archiving.
I have seen the following many times at clients:
* "We want to delete everything after 90 days."
* "Except for my mailbox... I need to keep that longer. :)"
* "Actually we want to have users categorize stuff manually and only keep business-relevant stuff more than 90 days."
* "Actually can we have some technology to automatically figure out what's important because our users will revolt if we ask them to do something more in their email?"
* "That technology doesn't exist huh?"
* "For now, we're going to keep data for 3 years until we define a better policy."
* "Actually, since the 3 years are up and we're not sure about deleting, let's just keep data indefinitely for now."
It's no one's fault but simply points to the complexity of matching business and legacy policy to the huge, unstructured and informal volume of email communication we have today.
No matter what, however, if you have the data, it's better to have it in one place where you can easily and cost-effectively search it for email discovery and other purposes.
Posted by Amy Dugdale on Thu, Jan 08, 2009 @ 07:22 PM
According to a recent Securities Industry News article, research firm TowerGroup believes "The Securities and Exchange Commissions' investment adviser regulatory functions should be rolled into the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)."
Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup believes a merger would address what some see as the SEC's failure to adequately police investment advisers by leveraging FINRA's resources, principally in the examination area. "From our perspective, the teeth to do this already exist at FINRA if they are allowed to use them," said senior research director Matthew Bienfang. "The SEC also has the teeth; they just don't have the resources."
But the part of the article that really caught my eye was where the author mentions that "...financially strapped advisory firms [are coming] under growing pressure to cut compliance costs, even as arbitration claims soar."
Working at a company that has helped thousands of registered investment advisors through regulatory audits over the last several years, I can tell you that many of them feel that in light of their limited compliance budgets they are over-regulated. They are small businesses that are expected to have compliance controls in place much like their enterprise-size brethren, which is exactly where SaaS comes in.
When email landed on the compliance radar in the early 2000s, smaller financial services companies quickly started picking up our SaaS email archiving and compliance solution - they realized almost immediately that they could get enterprise-class technology in a reasonable, pay-as-you-go monthly subscription service. Thousands of these companies are now clients of ours and I applaud them for proactively finding a solution that worked for them, both from a budget and compliance standpoint.
So while I won't ring in on whether the SEC and FINRA should merge their oversight branches (I'll leave that to the experts), I will mention that President-elect Obama has appointed FINRA CEO Mary Schapiro to head the SEC. This appointment hints to coming changes at the SEC that may mirror how FINRA currently operates in terms of oversight. With heightened regulatory scrutiny (resulting directly from the recent scandals and economic decline) and big changes coming at the SEC, these are uncertain times for many in the industry, but one thing will remain - our commitment to providing financial services professionals with effective and affordable SaaS tools for managing their email compliance.